Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways by Young Gavin

Author:Young, Gavin [Young, Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571287260
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

In time Jock came to agree with Syd that to survive Cathay needed three DC-4s, not one. Later still he preferred the larger DC-6: ‘We really ought to have an aircraft that can do HK–Bangkok–Singapore–HK in twenty-two hours.’ The trouble was there was not enough money: all through the early and mid-fifties, a shortage of capital tormented him and threatened the existence of the airline. A diary entry for January 1951 said, ‘I am terribly worried and depressed about Air but cannot see daylight.’

Despite the gloom, Cathay’s air operations, now depending on two DC-3s and the DC-4 (VR-HEU), continued apace. The single DC-4 Skymaster could take forty-three passengers and seemed to be everywhere at once, never out of the air. Her arrival had aroused considerable interest. When Captains John Presgrave and Dick Hunt inaugurated the Singapore flight, a reporter from the South China Morning Post who was aboard could barely contain himself: ‘The blue of the Gulf of Tonkin appeared to outshine the Mediterranean when I passed over it at 8,000 feet in the new Cathay Pacific Airways Skymaster….’ And in a gooey advertisement for the Saigon service, an unctuously smiling salesman announced, ‘That’s right, Sir – You get SKYMASTER COMFORT’. Vera Rosario hadn’t recalled much Skymaster comfort, but it turned out to be a popular plane with Chinese passengers: they felt safer with four engines than they had with two. Η. Η. Lee, Cathay’s (ex-CNAC) man in Singapore, a most important destination for Chinese businessmen, recalls: ‘The DC-4 called three times a week. HEU – How Easy Uncle. Everyone knew her – she was the only one we’d got! She’d leave Hong Kong in the early morning, touch down at Bangkok, and reach Singapore in the evening. Kai Tak had no night landing lights then, so the plane would take off from Singapore at 8 p.m., reach Bangkok at midnight, then leave at dawn for Hong Kong. We had a DC-3 from Rangoon and Calcutta, too. Our allies in ANA were running a scheduled service from Sydney to Singapore and Colombo, so Cathay from Hong Kong and ANA from Colombo met in Singapore and complemented each other.’

That the use to which the Skymaster was put was extremely high no one knew better than the Cathay representative in the midway stopover, Bangkok. He was an unusual man with an unusual name, Duncan Bluck, and had come across to Air from Swires’ shipping offices in Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama. He was to be decisively involved with Cathay for more than thirty years and end up as its Chairman.

From an office in the Trocadero Hotel Bluck went out to meet VR-HEU, often in the middle of the night, marvelling that Cathay’s only Skymaster was in such hectic use. In such use, indeed, that a puzzled Chinese businessman who flew in her regularly once asked Duncan quite innocently how it was that Cathay Pacific seemed to be the only airline to give all their DC-4s the same registration letters. He would have

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